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March 2015

Monday, 30 March 2015

I went to the Rock Roller's Gem Show on Friday and scored some jewelry findings (belt buckle blanks, bolo tips). I also picked up three slabs of agate and jasper that I will turn into cabochons. It was a good show, but a bit lighter on vendors than in past years. I took a mess of pictures and converted them into a video slideshow, which I uploaded to YouTube. Here is the slideshow

gdvdslides, my video slideshow creation program, has been around since 2009. I fixed three bugs from the original code on Saturday. That just proves that even six year old code can still have bugs in it. The last version of the program I released was 0.90 in 2012. The next version I will release will be 1.00, with (hopefully) no major bugs.

I also did a bit of changing to the hours/minutes/seconds calculator. It now has two modes: HMS or seconds only. This comes in handy if you want to convert seconds to HMS or vice versa. See the conversion example below.

I have cleaned up the Rimrock Software section of this web site. I have divided the items up into categories so it is easier to find a particular object. This was necessary since I will be adding more stuff to the section in the future.

I have pretty much finished tweaking both my slideshow program and the hours/minutes/seconds calculator. I am trying to create DEB packages for them, but that is not a simple thing to do, and there is no step by step document listing what you have to do. I will get there eventually, but it may take me a while. In the meantime, the web site is now set up so I can easily add a support section for each of the programs.

I will be going to the Rock Rollers Gem, Mineral and Jewelry Show tomorrow. It is the largest show in the area and it always has plenty of great displays. I will take a lot of pictures and will find some place to post them.

I spent the entire weekend at the Gold and Treasure Show at the fairgrounds. Our club made a few bucks there selling mineral specimens and jewelry. We won a free booth for next year, so we will have to dig up some more mineral specimens.

I took a step back and looked at all the videos I have put on YouTube. I haven't announced most of them here, so this is a list of them all. Note that the item in parentheses is the Linux program I used to create the video.

I went up to Chilco on Monday with a friend to look at a classic car that was for sale. It is a 1940 Plymouth Special Deluxe (P10) that needed to be re-assembled. It is just not a match for me, but it was fun to see it and the other projects that guy was working on (Dodge Challenger and Chevy pickup). I may look around some more, but I'm not all that serious about another classic car.

Today is the start of a very busy weekend for me. The mineral club meeting is tonight, and we have to make sure we are ready to participate in the gold and treasure show on Saturday and Sunday. Tomorrow we will go set up at the show. I will be participating in all these events, since I am the one who organized our participation in the first place.

If you aren't doing anything on Saturday from 9am to 5pm, or Sunday from 9am to 4pm, you should think about attending the 16th Annual Gold and Treasure Show at the Fairgrounds in Building 25. Admission is $3 for adults and kids 12 and under are free.

It finally started raining here and I changed the tires on my Honda from snow tires to regular the day before the rain started. I am now getting 3 mpg better gas mileage, even though the tires are indicating they need more air in them. Technology can be a PITA under certain circumstances.

I am going to look at another classic car on Monday and I thought I would drive my Plymouth, but it may still be raining.

I am now looking into putting my gdvdslides and HMSCalc-RPN programs into DEB packages. I have done that far in the past, but have forgotten how to do it. The IBM web site no longer has a tech page detailing how to do it, either.

On Saturday, I used the slideshow program to create a video that we will show at the mineral club meeting on Thursday. The video is of outstanding quality. It pays to use the highest resolution pictures you can get your mitts on.

On Saturday, I went to the Panorama Gem Show in Colville, WA, along with another mineral club member. The Panorama show is a lot smaller than ours, but they always have some very nice displays and good vendors. Here are some of their display items. Click on a photo to see the large version.

I have finished creating the EPUB version of the Campfire Coooking cookbook. It was a long, slow process as Sigil, the epub publishing program I use, has no import capability. That means I have to copy the plain text from the master document into Sigil, then add all the fancy stuff manually, like recipe headers and pictures.

The master cookbook document is an OpenOffice ODT file. I do most of my editing in that document. I then copy the result to Sigil for the EPUB. I create the PDF document in OpenOffice by doing an Export to PDF. All this takes a lot of time and effort.

I am doing a final editing pass on the master document and I should have both of the results published to the web sometime today.

It is now March, so I am going to produce the version 2 release of the Camp-Cook.com cookbook. I have been updating the base version of the cookbook each time new recipes appear on the web site, so it should not be a big task to produce the PDF and EPUB versions of the document. There will be over 1,200 recipes in over 600 pages of text.

I started to add some extra functionality to the hours/minutes/seconds calculator, but I got lost in the convoluted way I originally wrote the thing. So I decided to write the program over again and base it on Reverse Polish Notation (instead of algebraic notation), which is my prefered calculator type. I spent a day and a half creating the program, and here is what it looks like.

RPN is much, much easier to implement than algebraic notation, believe me. Either that, or I learned a lot more about programming in 20 years. This version of the calculator even handles negative values and values greater than 24 hours. Since the program is complete, I am now going back and documenting the source code, as well as adding some help to the program itself.